Letter To My 13-Year-Old Self

RE: Soul Coughing

Hey there. Your future self here, writing from the year
2013. Before I cut to the chase, I’d like to congratulate you on making
it through the summer of 1997 without obtaining a milk crate full of ska
records. Choosing Soul Coughing’s Irresistible Bliss over the
latest Goldfinger record was a prescient choice few tweens in Akron,
Ohio, would have made at the time, and I am here to tell you that you
chose correctly. Picking Airwalks over Vans was a total poseur move, but
putting your faith in that weirdo “slacker jazz” band from the Lower
East Side will turn out to be a trend-bucking maneuver you will not
regret.

The choice to sell your ticket to see Mike Doughty and company at the Odeon in Cleveland in order to purchase Magic: The Gathering
cards, however, will be very regrettable. You will use an impending
family vacation to some lake near Buffalo to further rationalize this
decision, but I’m here to inform you the vacation will end early, and
you’ll end up being able to go to the concert. You better find a way do
this, because the band will acrimoniously implode in 2000. This is your
last chance to see them. Sort of.

You see, after
throwing the other members of Soul Coughing under the bus in one
interview after the next, Doughty will spend the next decade as a
trad-rocker, releasing earnest, semicrunchy roots-rock records on
onetime tourmate Dave Matthews’ ATO label. You’ll be too busy listening
to emo to bother seeing him live, which won’t be worth your time,
anyway. Between acoustic ditties about his boozy days as a doorman at
the Knitting Factory, Doughty gets flustered when drunkards in the crowd
troll him endlessly by yelling out requests for alt-rock gold-rush-era
hits like “Super Bon Bon” and “Circles.”

Rather than get the
band back together to cash in on nostalgia like contemporaries Pavement
or Archers of Loaf—two other ’90s bands you’ll inevitably trade your
Senses Fail and Taking Back Sunday records for—Doughty is trotting out
the oldies on a tour he’s snarkily dubbed “M. Doughty Used to Be in Soul
Coughing.” The title is meant to take the piss out of residual fans who
would rather not see him grow up and move on, yet the end result is the
same: a live set of Soul Coughing songs! Doughty will be the only
original member, but it will certainly be better than watching the other
dudes attempt to re-create the hits with the former lead singer of
Dishwalla or the New Radicals in Doughty’s place.

If you’ve already sold that ticket, there’s not much else I can do but urge you not to sell those Magic cards to buy books for college. They’ll turn out to be worth a lot more than your communications degree.